Empire
by I Am Your Spy
Summary: “Did you really think that, after everything we’ve done, you’d get to have a happy ending?” Sequel to Ordinary World and Exiles.
1. Our man in Mexico

**Empire: Our man in Mexico**  
Disclaimer: These are Alan Moore's characters. But I don't think I can do anything worse to them than what the Hamm screenplay did. There actually is a paper called Midnight Notes but this has nothing to do with that.

A/N: This is the sequel to _Ordinary World_ and _Exiles._

.net/s/4917742/1/Ordinary_World  
.net/s/4931455/1/Exiles

* * *

  
_"We have so far taken the official story at face value, but should we? Do we trust our leaders—those same leaders whose arrogance brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, and who now carve out secret deals behind closed doors—to tell us the truth about what it was and from where it came? Now that the dust has settled, we owe the victims—and ourselves, the survivors—an unbiased and thorough inquiry into the monster's origins." – From Midnight Notes, March 1, 1986. Author unknown._

_In the desert  
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,  
Who, squatting upon the ground,  
Held his heart in his hands,  
And ate of it.  
I said, "Is it good, friend?"  
"It is bitter – bitter", he answered,  
"But I like it  
Because it is bitter,  
And because it is my heart." — Stephen Crane, "In the Desert"_

The shantytown is quiet tonight. Rows of tin-roofed houses stand guard in the dust, surrounded by snaking lines of chain link fence, and the only creature brave enough to break the silence is a stray dog that weaves drunkenly along the road.

For the last five nights, a man has been seen in the _colonias_ that ring Tijuana, prowling the streets in search of easy targets. Young women, migrant workers fleeing starvation in the South, they come here in search of a job and, instead, are found in the mornings, naked, battered and sobbing. One didn't survive. The residents of the shantytown complained to the local authorities, but the rapes and murders of _campesinas_ are of little concern. And so the people band together instead, strangers from distant places, and hold watch for one another by their makeshift doorways, gripping salvaged pipes and sticks.

The town holds its breath. People tell each other that they have weathered worse, and besides, if things keep up this way, eventually _they_ will come. Eventually, the dead girl will be avenged.

There have been costumed adventurers in the region for decades, but in the last few months—rumor has it—their numbers and activity has increased. It's almost as though they're trying to provoke the gangs of criminals that prey on the _colonias_ into an all-out war. They must be mad, but then, sane people do not put on masks and wander these streets after dark.

The sound of a man's cry, a body meeting metal, ruptures the stillness. One by one, people emerge from their hovels to watch.

There must be a dozen of them, armed only with their muscles and anger. Their masks—some, elaborate creations permanently fixed in open-mouth shouts of rage, others, swaths of fabric that reveal only bright eyes—take on a certain life in the darkness, as though they are the wearers' true faces, as though nothing human lives beneath.

They surround the murderer, cornering him against a line of fence, bashes him into it again and again, beat him and kick him until his face is a pulpy wreck, teeth hanging loose in a mouth coughing blood. When he's too weak to stand on his own, one of the men drags him upright and plants him in front of the huts, kicking him once for good measure where he lies on the ground. The murderer is still breathing. The masked man doesn't speak—they, it is said, never speak—but his intention is clear. He relinquishes his claim on the killer's life; it belongs to the victims he has wronged, and the final stroke of justice will be theirs.

A woman—the dead girl's mother—slips from the doorway of one of the shelters, holding a steel pipe in her hands. She hits the prone man, once, then again, until he twitches and lies still.

The man nods, and turns to rejoin his companions as a police siren wails behind the roofline.

The people of the town know what to do in these circumstances. They throw open their doors and allow anyone to pass through; they turn away, respectfully, as masks are removed and vigilantes become civilians, find refuge in anonymity.

Except that, this time, the police know to look for the two among them who will never willingly show their faces.

The shantytown is swarmed in minutes, doors thrown open and belongings thrown into the streets until the cops find their targets. They grab the smaller man first—it takes six of them to restrain him and a seventh to tear off the bandanas wrapped around his face, revealing pale, freckled skin and copper hair, a thin mouth that scowls and spits at them. The other man comes out of the shadows, hands raised, and as they move towards him, kicks out at the nearest officer to send him reeling. But he's outnumbered and unarmed, and, defiant as he is, he can't catch bullets.

Perhaps the people watching want to help. They owe these men, just as they owe the local masks who live amongst them, who defend their homes and their lives. But tomorrow, the gringos will be gone, and the police will still be here to terrorize the slums. And so, reluctantly, they retreat back into their homes, the two strangers are taken away in squad cars, and the shantytown returns to its tense and troubled rest.

* * *

  
Dan sits on a bench in a holding cell, watching Rorschach try to simultaneously pick the lock and devour the tray of grey slop he's balancing against the bars, and it occurs to him—though only fleetingly—that he could have been an investment banker. He entertains those thoughts with much less frequency these days; he could, after all, also have been among the unwitting throngs crushed beneath the monster's death throes four months ago. The oppressive heat, the panic of confinement, of discovery, aren't so bad in comparison. He's survived worse.

"Might take awhile." Rorschach eyes Dan's untouched tray. Dan shrugs, then nods, and his partner snatches it off the ground. It's not a good sign that there's food at all. It means that no one is planning to release them quickly. It means that right now, the police are checking databases, phoning colleagues across the border, attempting to discern the identities of two Americans with no names, no wallets, and only a smattering of Spanish between them both. And while costumed adventuring is still quite legal in Mexico, Dan is fairly certain that aggravated assault and murder aren't. "Lock better than yours. Though, not saying much."

He slides onto the bench, one leg just _barely_ touching Dan's jeans, and Dan smiles at him wearily. "You okay?"

"Tired," Rorschach says, though the scrape of his fork against the tray doesn't slow at all. "Long night. Still. Good."

"Sure," Dan replies. "Right up until we got arrested, anyway."

"Worth it."

He sees the splatter of blood, the woman swinging the pipe with all of the strength in her undernourished body, her cheeks stained with tears. He wishes he knew for sure if it was as right as it felt in that moment. He grows less sure with every night they've spent here, taking on the sins and the tragedies of others, letting others bear the violence that they've carried on their backs all the way from the bottom of the world.

He chose this, he thinks. It was his idea, because if they can't go home, if they can't save the millions who sleep in mass graves or beneath the Hudson River, at least they can take some displaced vengeance. One bereaved woman's tears are the same as any other's, and every night he can keep Rorschach distracted is one more night that he can have his partner by his side, alive and feigning sanity, one more night that he can pretend that it all turns out okay in the end.

"Yeah," Dan says quietly. "Worth it."

Rorschach glances at him, ever inscrutable, and then crouches on the floor to file the fork against the cell wall. Dan closes his eyes and rubs his temples and only notices that something is wrong when the scratching abruptly stops.

He scrambles off the bench and drops to his knees beside his partner, who lies in a crumpled heap by the wall. He lifts Rorschach up, checks for a pulse, opens one eye to see a dilated pupil. Drugged—must have been the food, and Dan is suddenly glad that his nausea threshold is lower than Rorschach's. He eases the smaller man back down on the ground and smashes his hand on the bars, yells out for help in English and, as best he can, in Spanish.

The police station might as well be empty. He slams into the door, then, heart hammering against his ribs, returns to his unconscious partner's side. He's still breathing, at least, and Dan picks him up and cradles him, murmurs, "Wake up, oh God please wake up."

Footsteps, then a shadow falls over the floor in front of the cell, a familiar voice, warm and rich: "Hello, Daniel."

* * *

  
"Do you have any idea," Adrian Veidt asks, "how much it costs to buy off an entire police division?" He stands in front of the bars, impeccably dressed in a shimmering violet suit, hands folded behind his back, and Dan wants to punch the smirk off his face.

"What are you doing here?" Dan hisses.

"As it turns out," Veidt continues, ignoring him entirely as he searches through the pockets of his jacket. "It doesn't cost very much at all. Incidentally, that man you killed was the nephew of the police chief. I'm afraid your situation is about to become increasingly uncomfortable. Ah!" He retrieves a set of keys and opens the cell door, looking immensely pleased with himself. "In answer to your question, I'm here to spring you."

Dan wonders if, perhaps, he was hit on the head during his arrest and this is all a bizarre hallucination—Veidt, in an emptied Mexican police station, hand extended to help Dan to his feet. Dan brushes him aside. "What did you do to Rorschach?"

"Oh," Veidt says. "Don't worry about him. He'll be out for hours. I find that you and I have more productive discussions when he's not a part of them. For some reason. Don't look so unhappy, Dan. When was the last time he had a good night's sleep?" Veidt picks up the unconscious man as if he weighs nothing, and Dan winces, vaguely sickened at the thought of Veidt even _touching_ his partner. "You should be thanking me."

"_Fuck_ you," and then immediately regrets how pathetic he sounds, childishly defiant when he knows that he has no choice to follow Veidt out the door and into the limo parked outside, no choice but to dance to whatever tune Veidt feels like playing next. He lets himself be herded into the back seat, Rorschach beside him, slumping into his lap, warm and loose-limbed like he never is when he's awake. Dan strokes his partner's hair, glaring all the time at the back of Veidt's head. "Seriously, Adrian, why are you here? Last I heard you were considering a presidential run."

A considered pause, then: "Do I need a reason to visit old friends?" But there's an edge in his voice, and Dan leans forward, intent on catching every hesitation, every sharp intake of breath. "But you're right, of course. I'm afraid that something has gone horribly wrong."

* * *

  
Dan doesn't bother turning on the lights in his apartment; he can see well enough with a full moon shining through the single window, and in the darkness, it's easier to ignore Veidt's smirk as he piles Rorschach onto the bed—the only bed in the tiny, confined apartment—and then joins Dan at the kitchen table. "You're a hard man to find."

"That's kind of the idea of being in hiding." The heat clings to him, seeps beneath his cotton shirt and beads perspiration at his hairline. He hopes that Veidt is horribly uncomfortable in that suit. Physically perfect though he might be, he still has to sweat. "I've done what you've asked. I've kept your goddamned secret. I've stayed out of your way. I've kept Rorschach out of your way, which, by the way, isn't exactly an easy task, especially with you making headlines back home. Leave us alone."

"Hmm." He opens the briefcase and retrieves something; a yellowing newspaper, the type smudging and set in cramped columns that swim into charcoal in the dim light. Dan makes a frustrated noise and hits the lights.

The paper is called _Midnight Notes_, and he doesn't remember having seen it before. Part of his brain registers an anti-Nixon screed and an editorial about gentrification, but his eyes immediately focus on the blaring headline—_11-2 Hoax?_—and the accompanying pictures: one, a grainy photograph of the monster, the other, a painting by the mysteriously vanished artist Hira Manish.

"You see my problem," Veidt says.

"This could put a damper on your political aspirations," Dan says dryly, then shakes his head. "You had to expect conspiracy theories," he says as his eyes scan the article. It stops well short of blaming any particular nation or person, but it definitely gets a number of details right—the similarities between the monster's appearance and the work of the missing painter, the timing of the creature's arrival, the possibility that its origin was terrestrial.

"A conspiracy theory would put it on the Soviets—or Nixon, given the paper's political leanings—not bring up Manish." His hand irons out the wrinkles and folds in the paper and comes away smudged with ink. "The person who wrote this _knows_, Daniel."

Dan shudders. Veidt might have let them go before, but he's clearly agitated now, paranoid, and Dan can't blame him. He wills himself to be calm, scans the room for something to use as a weapon. There's a baseball bat under the bed, but Veidt has, of course, positioned himself between Dan and his sleeping partner. He can't run, and he can't fight Veidt, and so he digs his fingers into the sides of the chair and swallows hard.

"You don't think that Rorschach is writing for left-wing underground papers, do you?"

Veidt laughs. "He could have changed. That gang that the two of you were running with—they were linked to a movement trying to overthrow the government that Blake installed here a decade ago. You ought to learn a bit more about the locals before getting yourself involved in their problems. That was Blake's weakness too." He leans across the table to pat Dan's arm. "Breathe, Daniel. I know it wasn't Rorschach. The writing is too coherent."

"Then why come here?"

"Well," Veidt says, "for one thing, I'm not entirely convinced that it isn't _you_."

Dan relaxes; if Veidt actually suspected him, he'd be dead. Veidt doesn't take chances. "I've been living here since January."

"There is such thing as postal service, is there not? You could have been mailing it to an associate in New York."

"I don't _have_ associates, Adrian. You took care of that. The only people I know are in this apartment."

Veidt nods. "As I thought. But who, then? You could have told someone, or Rorschach could have told someone—but I doubt it. You know what's at stake, and he's hardly a credible source."

Dan stands out and extends a hand, which Veidt doesn't take. "Okay, then. Great. You head back to whatever rock you crawled out from under, and we'll be moving on. Deal?"

"It isn't quite so simple. I need to find this leak and plug it." He clears his throat, and Dan thinks, for a moment, that the conversation they are having costs him something in pride. "I need you. _Both_ of you."

"You can clean up your own loose ends."

"I'm afraid," Veidt replies, "it's not just a matter of finding this guy and shutting him down. I need to know _how_ he found out, and from whom, and much as it pains me to admit it, that's more your partner's forte than mine." He casts a glance back at the motionless form on the bed. "How's that for irony?"

"You, uh…" He tries a few phrases out in his head, but none of them make much sense. "You want us to track down a guy who wrote an article leaking your murderous plans to the world."

"Yes."

"And you want us to extract information from this man and then kill him."

Veidt pauses, then, "Well, yes."

"And you think that _Rorschach_, of all people, is going to go along with this?"

"Hmm. Also yes. He's going to, because you're going to convince him. He trusts you, as do I. And I know you'll do the right thing. Sit back down, Dan, and tell me that you agree."

He sits, but he immediately splutters: "No—no I don't. Staying silent is one thing, because I'm not going to be the guy who ends world peace by opening his mouth. But killing some innocent person because you have a security leak? I won't."

"To save billions of lives?" Dan shakes his head. "To save _his_?"

Searing hatred bubbles in his gut. He didn't think it was possible to hate Veidt any more than he already does, but if seething anger and adrenaline could overcome preternatural speed and skill, the man sitting in front of him would be in pieces.

"Get out of my house. You don't have any right—"

"I have _every_ right." And now Veidt stands, looms over him, the glow from the single light bulb a corona around his golden hair, beautiful and terrible all at once. "What this man knows can kill billions. We swore to defend the world—_all_ of us—and we're the only ones left now, the last guard post between peace and Armageddon. You don't get to walk away from something like that. Not out of some self-righteous squeamishness, not because you…" He can feel Veidt's breath on his face; they're close enough that he could reach out and throttle the man, if only he were fast enough. "Did you really think that, after everything we've done, you'd get to have a happy ending?"

Dan stands up and quietly pushes his chair under the table, eyes a cockroach scuttling across the kitchen counter. There's a beer left in the fridge, and he pops the cap and takes a long swig. "I'm working on it," he replies.

"He won't ever be sane, or happy." Veidt has a way of sounding concerned, of taking on your pain as his own, and that's yet another reason to hate him, because Dan is drawn to that honeyed voice, its promise of release, understands that beneath its slick surface, there's a kernel of unadulterated truth. "People don't recover from that kind of damage. He won't change."

Dan hears his own voice falter as he says, "I'm not trying to change him."

"You're trying to fix him. And it's noble, and pathetic, and it doesn't matter at all next to _this_." He slaps the folded newspaper down on the table. "I'll be back tomorrow night to fly us all home."

"And if we're gone?"

The smirk is back. "I'll find you." Veidt opens the briefcase again and takes out a small box, slides it across the table. "Here," he says. "A token of my sincerity."

He's gone before Dan can open the lid and feel the blood drain from his face as he sees what's inside, and there's no point in trying to pursue him, no point in doing anything at all but sit, and tremble, at the table in the apartment that he'll have abandoned by tomorrow night.


	2. Stains

**Stains**

_  
"But isn't every square inch of our cities a crime scene? Every passer-by a culprit?" — Walter Benjamin_

The mask feels cold in his hands, the inside stiff with dried blood, inkblots trapped in a jagged wave as if they were frozen mid-shift, as if it had _died_ then. It's hot in the apartment—a dusty fan beats stale air from the corner with a rattle—but Dan shivers. Gently, almost reverently, he carries it to the kitchen sink and lets the water run over it in rivulets that carry away flecks of crimson.

Slowly, the black begins to move again beneath the mask's surface, drops of ink fanning out from the center, and he runs a finger across it, encouraging its feeble stirs. The shape splits beneath his touch, re-forms as he draws it away.

"Responds to changes in heat," Rorschach's voice, husky with sleep, says from behind him.

He startles, almost guiltily, and shakes the mask dry. They share a glance, and then he holds it out to his partner, who regards it coolly for a moment where it sleeps, draped over his hands.

"Veidt," he says, like Dan and the mask have both somehow betrayed him.

"Yeah," Dan replies. He doesn't want to explain; he's not sure what it is he's supposed to say. He doesn't think he should be interrupting this reunion at all. "He, uh. He was here. Do you want—"

Calloused fingertips brush against his palms as Rorschach takes the mask from him, holds it in front of his face for a moment and then, without any sort of fanfare, slides it over his head. It comes to life, the disjointed black patches coagulating into an abstract splatter, and he remembers that he isn't supposed to try to read them because they don't mean anything, because that's the whole _point_. Dan takes a step backward, hitting his hip against the kitchen counter. It's been so long since he's seen that face; it's something that belongs to his distant past, from before he started deluding himself that the face he sees when he wakes, with its sharp angles and pockmarks and freckles, is real.

He tells himself not to be stupid—of course it's the same guy, of course it's his _friend_, the man who's saved his life more times than he can count. It's wrong to want him to be broken and lost so that maybe, he'll stay with Dan forever.

"Rorschach?"

The inkblots shift in response.

"Does this, uh." He doesn't know how to say it. Doesn't want to _have_ to say it, wants Rorschach to just know what he's thinking and say it for him. "Does this change things?"

"Veidt back. Face returned. Of course changes things." Even his voice is different, muffled beneath the latex.

"I meant—" And he almost steps towards his partner again, almost runs a hand down his arm and presses a kiss to the mask's ever-changing pattern. But he doesn't. "Never mind. It's…good to see you again."

"Good to be back," Rorschach says, and his face gives nothing away.

* * *

  
They don't discuss it for very long. Dan sits by the window and the sun swells above dilapidated apartment buildings and turns the dust in the air luminous gold. Rorschach paces, incongruous in a wife-beater and his mask, turning the newspaper over in his hands. They speak in fragments: "Should we—" "Can't." "Have no choice."

"Veidt will kill the guy either way," Dan offers. "If not us, he'll involve someone else. At least we have a chance of warning him." And if the guy actually _does_ know that Veidt was behind the monster, if he's brave enough to go up against the smartest man in the world, then there's no point in warning him anyway. Dan feels a glimmer of sympathy for the writer, whoever he is, mixed with more than a little envy. He's managed to succeed where they've both failed, again and again. They've been patrolling nearly every night—their bodies, in the warm light of morning, bear the bruised purple of what he mostly thinks is a noble fight—and yet they've been completely _useless_.

"Will be expecting that. Knew you would try to convince me."

"Well, we can't do _nothing_." Maybe they can, he thinks. Maybe they can escape somewhere else, keep running like he'd once planned, abandon the hapless journalist and find a corner of the world where they're safe. Somehow, he thinks Rorschach won't agree to that. "What do you want to do?"

Considered silence, then: "Wait for Veidt to return. Kill him."

"He has to be expecting that too."

Rorschach nods. "Better death."

Oh, _hell_. "No." Dan bites his tongue before he can say, _You promised_. For all he knows now, it was Kovacs who promised him that. But he climbs to his feet anyway, limbs heavy and aching, and grabs his partner by the shoulder with a suddenness that makes him drop the paper, slides his other hand to cup the side of his face, his thumb pressing into the underside of Rorschach's jaw, forcing his head up. "No."

Rorschach tries to twist out of his grasp, but he just digs his fingers in tighter, and though Dan is sure that the slightest touch of the smaller man's hand could make him crumble into dust, Rorschach allows himself to be held in place. Just this proximity, Dan thinks, the heat of his skin and the hiss of his rapid breathing into latex, will be his downfall.

"You don't really want Veidt to kill you," Dan says. "You want to win." It isn't true, but Rorschach is too proud to admit otherwise. "He has vulnerabilities, and this guy obviously found one. So we need to find him before Veidt does."

"Veidt counting on it."

"That isn't a no."

"No better options." His hand closes around Dan's wrist, tugging it from his face and bringing it to rest at his side, but he doesn't let go, and his grip is crushing. "Been away from city too long. Forgot duty. Forgot purpose. Very bad."

"It wasn't your fault," Dan tells him. "I'm—I'm sorry, Rorschach." He isn't, not really, not for the three or so months they've had together where his friend has seemed almost at peace, these days he's stolen from history's ticking clock, the nights that one wakes from troubled dreams and the other reaches his hand across the bed to banish them. He can't be sorry for this. "We'll go home now, okay?"

* * *

  
And so they are flying home.

Veidt's people arrive at midnight, heavily armed, and inform them that he sends his regrets, that he's been asked to broker peace negotiations in Jerusalem and had to leave immediately. That he hopes they find his accommodations comfortable. They allow themselves to be herded into a limo without protest. Dan looks out the back window at a crowd of onlookers and bids farewell to the country that welcomed them with far more warmth than his own ever did.

The airship rises above the city and its slums, backtracks over their hard-won path across the country, the interstate shining through a patchwork of darkness below them. Through the window, Dan traces the line of the miles they've traveled while Rorschach, his mask pushed up to the bridge of his nose, crunches package after package of peanuts and writes incomprehensible comments in the margins of the _Midnight Notes_. He's never flown in an airship that isn't Archie but the grind of the engines doesn't seem to disturb his concentration. And, Dan thinks, it gives them both a good excuse to not say very much.

He hates himself for how he keeps staring at the orange-stubbled line of his partner's jaw, the way his Adam's apple bobs when he swallows, the deep lines around his mouth. They took down criminals for years before, celebrating on the night that they captured Underboss, Dan had finally stripped off his cowl and goggles and told Rorschach his real name. Dan knows that he'd never have known Rorschach's had it not been for his arrest. It shouldn't matter, he thinks; he's willing to kill and die for the mad son-of-a-bitch regardless.

The faintest whisper of dawn is creeping over the sides of skyscrapers and rippling over the water of the harbor as the airship circles and begins its descent.

_Home,_ he thinks, his ruined city and its haunted people and everything he fled. It deserves his apology more than Rorschach does, and he pleads with it silently: _I had to leave. Things were falling apart._ And like his partner, who pulls the mask down and hunches his shoulders as if bracing for a blow, the city offers him no answer.

Veidt's men take them from the landing field to a brownstone not far from where Dan used to live, the street quiet in the early hours of dawn, the way Manhattan never should be. He hates that the sidewalk is tidy, that there are lights on in the windows, as if the monster never happened, as if the city, in their absence, has forgotten them. They don't have to worry about rent, one of the guards says, and Veidt has set up new identities for them, a bank account from which to withdraw whatever they need over the course of the investigation, and do they need a car? (Rorschach snarls at this, and Dan is almost overcome with a wave of affection for him as he mutters that they can get around fine on the subway.)

"And you're under surveillance," the guard adds. "Don't bother trying to look for the bugs—you won't find them all. Just know that we're keeping an eye on you."

"I thought Adrian trusted me," Dan says, but apparently Veidt doesn't look for a sense of humor in his employees because the man just stares, hand on his gun. "You're just gonna, what, stay out here all night?"

Now the man smiles, somewhat unpleasantly. "No," he replies. "I don't need to. Have a good day, gentlemen." He turns on his heels, and they're alone again, in a house that reminds him too much of a place to which he can never return, Veidt watching them with unseen eyes.

"Can't talk here," Rorschach tells him, following Dan upstairs as he deposits their meager possessions in the bedroom. He's too tired to sort through them now, though somewhere in one of the duffel bags is his costume. He kicks them both under the bed. "Need to find safer place."

"Yeah," Dan says. "But, uh, could we maybe sleep first?" When there's no response, he adds, "I can take the couch downstairs if you want."

He thinks he sees Rorschach's posture stiffen. "No need." He stands there as Dan strips down to his undershirt and boxers, takes off his glasses, and climbs into bed.

"You don't wear that when you sleep, do you?" Dan asks.

Rorschach hesitates, then peels off his mask and places it on the bedside table, pauses a moment longer before crawling into bed beside Dan, curling away from him to face the wall, twisting the sheets around his body so that all Dan can see of him is a blur of red hair. Dan flops over and runs a hand over his back, the contours of his ribs and spine too prominent beneath his thin shirt, and Rorschach tolerates it for a minute, even edges into the touch a little, before he pulls away.

Though he's exhausted, Dan is awake long after his partner has drifted off. He stares up at the ceiling, wonders if Veidt is looking back, and mumbles, to the air, "Goodnight."

* * *

  
If Veidt was counting on subtlety, Dan thinks, he'll be disappointed by the trail of carnage along the strip of bars that leads to where Happy Harry's used to be. It has little to do with any sort of investigation and everything to do with Rorschach flaunting his return and the still-minimal police presence in the face of any criminals who might be taking liberties in the new world order.

Still, it has an effect. By the fourth place they hit, Dan is comfortably ensconced on a barstool, whisky in hand, and a blubbering top-knot is filling him in on the changes that have taken place over the months that they've been gone. Organized crime is down, though the short supply of drugs made everyone crazier than usual throughout the long winter.

"And the nightmares," the kid says. "Everyone wants to escape _those_. But it's dry out there, man, completely dry."

About the _Midnight Notes_, he knows nothing, although he's seen it around, a free rag deposited in stacks on street corners. For a paper no one signs their name to, it gets quite the distribution. Still, the top-knot doesn't believe the conspiracy theories—the thing came from outer space, no doubt about it. If Dan didn't know better, the kid would sound quite sane. He finds himself nodding in agreement—no human could be responsible for such a thing; it would take a brand of evil beyond comprehension.

Dan watches Rorschach bend a man's arm in a direction that arms generally shouldn't bend, and wishes he could be certain that there is more to life than varying degrees of horror.

* * *

  
Dawn finds them at Ground Zero, sitting on overturned milk crates where a newsstand is abandoned in a flutter of old paper and ash. There are still homemade memorials, soggy from the last rain, Polaroid grave-markers and dying flowers. This is one of the places, at least according to the top-knot, where _Midnight Notes_ gets dropped off. Dan sifts through torn fragments, sentence strings without meaning or context.

Rorschach is oddly still and even quieter than usual. "Used to come here often."

"I know," Dan says. "Your mailbox was over there, right?"

"Hated city. Sin, corruption, filth. Watched from diner. Bloated, disgusting lives. Thought of wiping slate clean."

Dan wonders if it worked, if the world's a better place for missing several million New Yorkers. From where he sits, it doesn't look much different—sadder, a little more empty—but then, he's not seeing mushroom clouds either.

"Yeah, well. I'm glad you lacked the resources."

A car drives by, splashing rainwater and tossing a bundle of papers out of the back window and speeds off, and oh, of course it wouldn't be that easy. Rorschach is chasing after it before Dan can get to his feet. He catches up with his partner several blocks away.

"Writer has money," Rorschach says, the taillights receding into misted air. "Nice car. Free paper. No source of funding."

"Right. We just need to search the entire city for a rich guy with a nice car and a death wish."

"Hurm," Rorschach says. "Also, have license plate number."

Dan rolls his eyes.

"Should split up," Rorschach says. Dan feels his stomach lurch in the beat before Rorschach adds, "Cover more ground that way."

_Right. That._ He doesn't much like that idea either. He's not sure he trusts Rorschach, half-enslaved to his own goddamned mask, not to be a complete ass. He nods in agreement anyway.

Rorschach flicks a gloved finger at a dumpster. "Not safe to talk in the open. Know how to reach me."

"You've got to be kidding. Veidt figured out that one before."

"Different mailbox. Daniel?"

"Yeah?"

"Would never have done what Veidt did. Even with resources. City is diseased. Can't be burned away. Only survived."

"You wouldn't have given up hope," Dan says softly.

"No."

This is the last he sees of his partner for three days.


	3. Midnight

**Midnight**

_"You told me again you preferred handsome men, but for me you would make an exception…" – Leonard Cohen_

He takes to leaving notes in the dumpster, wedged into the handle of the lid. In the beginning, they're short, updates on his progress written in cramped handwriting: _Uptown a wash so far. Any luck on your end?_

For the first day, there's no response, then a map with a large area near the docklands scribbled black appears where he'd left the earlier notes. The pen pushes through the thin paper, ripping it in places, and he runs his fingers over the ridges it creates. No leads in that area of town either, then.

He writes: _Where are you now?_, and waits, the metal wall of the dumpster icy against his back, even through his cape, for longer than he really should. It's raining again, and the pavement glistens as if newborn, and Rorschach doesn't come.

On the second day, another blacked-out map, and another note: _Caution. Being watched._

He responds, _Need to see you._

He's deep into a nightmare, the next morning, when he hears the bedroom door creak open. Rorschach smells like a sewer, dripping onto the carpet as he drags himself to the bed, and Dan's heart gives an irritating thrill of relief. He wants it to be from worry and not because his partner is a splinter beneath his skin that's slowly working its way into his bloodstream.

"Where have you been?"

"Agreed on means of communication," Rorschach mutters, barely audible beneath his mask. "Been occupied."

"Sorry," Dan says.

The mask comes off without any sort of prompting on Dan's part, then the coat. Beneath it, his collar is soaked. The rain must have worsened outside; Dan gave up scouring the streets when it was only the lesser sort of torrential downpour. "Be more careful."

"Uh huh," Dan says, and fumbles in the half-dark to put a hand on Rorschach's leg, thumbing damp cotton. A normal person would be shivering. "Where've you been sleeping?"

"_Daniel._"

"Right. Okay, we don't need to talk." He pushes himself up on one arm and snakes the other over Rorschach's shoulder, fiddles with his shirt buttons. Rorschach starts to shove him and it somehow turns into his partner's bony frame pressing into him, fever-warm and insistent as he grabs Dan's wrist and holds it away from him and doesn't let go. "I really," Dan's teeth and tongue pressing against his partner's neck, "missed you."

"Room bugged," Rorschach hisses, as if Dan could forget.

"I don't care." He's starting to think he's going crazy, like he's imagined the past four months, the feeble thread that stretches between them and makes him ache when Rorschach is gone. He tells himself to be serious; for once, Rorschach is thinking more clearly than he is, grasps the danger they're in, reluctantly slides back under the sheets. "Come to bed. You're freezing."

It doesn't take more than that. The bags under Rorschach's eyes look purple in the dull light, and it's both vindication, that he hasn't slept well either, and it also _hurts_. This time, even the cameras in the ceiling and walls won't see Dan reach, under the sheets, to cup his hands.

He traces a lazy spiral on his partner's palm. It becomes an R, and Rorschach lifts his head, suddenly interested. Dan lets the corner of his mouth lift in an almost-smile. Unless there are bugs in the sheets themselves, Veidt can't see what his hand is doing.

_F_ he draws with his index finger; Rorschach nods, and he keeps going _-IND ANYTHING?_

_MAYBE._ A pause, then: _NIGHT. FOLLOW. NOT CLOSE._

"Mmmhmm," he says, his hand moving for Rorschach's hip, sliding beneath the waistband of his pants, feels the pop of the button against his skin. Rorschach shudders and he traces out _V CANT SEE_.

"Can figure it out," Rorschach hisses, and Dan is just turned on enough not to mention that Veidt figured _that_ out months ago. It's been so long, he thinks, and they're always only barely outrunning death and besides, he'll lose Rorschach to the goddamned mask again soon enough.

In the meantime, his partner's cock twitches under his hand, and he scoots closer to tuck Rorschach's head under his chin. His hair is growing out again, and Dan breathes in the tips of his curls, the scent of him, grime and leather and rain and blood, always blood, a perpetual stain that marks him even in the darkness of the bedroom. He feels Rorschach tug his own verging-on-painful erection free from his boxers and presses into his partner's blind and clumsy touches.

A strained noise forces its way past Rorschach's thin lips; Dan breathes into his ear, "Shh, stay still," and sees him catch the fabric of the pillowcase in his teeth to keep from crying out.

He can't give words to this, not even secretly, traced across Rorschach's body as his partner slips into a few hours of uneasy sleep. When he wakes again, they won't acknowledge it, and he will watch Rorschach steal from the room to cover more of the city in furious black ink.

* * *

  
The rain is constant, unyielding. Dan braces himself against the wind, his goggles fogged and streaked, smearing the harsh angles of concrete and metal into amorphous shapes. Somewhere in the ravaged and winter-bare city is Rorschach, slouched in a coat that can no longer disguise how thin he's become. Dan catches glimpses of him, when he allows himself to be seen, turning a corner into deeper shadows, tracking a convoluted route through streets Dan barely recognizes anymore.

The sidewalks are almost deserted; only a pair of junkies, huddled in a doorway, sees Rorschach tug aside a manhole cover and vanish into the steam that rises above it.

Dan grimaces and follows a moment later, climbs down a rusting ladder into ankle-deep liquid. The stench assaults his nostrils and curls in his throat, and the goggles cast the tunnel in sickly yellows and grays.

"You think it's safe to talk _here_?" Dan asks.

Rorschach emerges from a curve in the tunnel, his flashlight blinding through the night vision. "Veidt doesn't like to get hands dirty. Were followed from house."

"I didn't see anyone."

"Hurm. Lost several blocks ago." He starts walking again, and Dan sloshes through the sewer water to catch up.

"So what did you find?"

"Car abandoned. Knows he's being tracked."

"Did you see him?"

Rorschach shrugs. "Saw where he went."

There's a stillness inside the city's polluted veins, a part of it, the filthiest, darkest part that remains untouched by the horrors above. Maybe this is where they belong, with the rats, survivors of the old order, dirty and stumbling through its refuse. He suspects—and there's a twist in his gut as he realizes it—that Rorschach has been sleeping down here for the past few nights, but before he can ask about it, they resurface on Eighth Avenue near an out-of-business textile factory. There's a light in the window of the top floor, and Rorschach raises a finger to his mask before pointing it to the front entrance.

Dan makes his way to the door and Rorschach scrambles up the fire escape at the side of the building. There's a freight elevator, broken; the only way out that's not blocked is out the window. He feels a twinge of pity for their target, no doubt aware he's being hunted, imagines him cowering in fear upstairs as he hammers out on a typewriter what he thinks are his last words. What might _be_ his last words, unless Rorschach has a better plan than anything Dan can envision.

He plods up the stairs. There's a crash, and he starts running, following the noise until his breath catches in his chest and he twists at the handle of a locked door. He swears under his breath and grabs a pick from his belt as the now-familiar sound of a human body thudding into a wall echoes from inside.

It's a set-up, he thinks, cursing himself for his own stupidity as he manages to click the lock open and bursts into what is apparently a newspaper office with printing presses and stacks of old papers lining the walls. A flurry of white leaves explodes around a black-clad figure as Rorschach tosses him into a pile of proofs. But their writer, far from being helpless, snaps his legs up in a speed-blurred kick, and as Rorschach staggers back, springs to his feet. It's only then, as his leg spins in a second kick that catches Rorschach's side and long hair sweeps over his masked face, that Dan realizes that the person his partner is fighting is even smaller than he is. That the person isn't—and why should this surprise him, in their enlightened age?—a man at all.

He clicks the goggles back to a regular view and now he can see the glitter of silver at his partner's throat as the woman coils from behind him, a stiletto blade in one gloved hand, her head leaning into the side of his mask as though they were lovers, whispers: "I should have known it would be you."

"Oh God." Dan steps out from behind a row of desks, hands raised and heart thudding. That voice, the shape of her lips curved into a smile, familiar beneath the leather that shrouds the top of her face.

"Nite Owl," she purrs, delighted.

"_Leslie?_"

* * *

  
He can feel her eyes on him, evaluating, without charity, how the years have piled their weight upon him: the slouch of his shoulders, the bulges of flesh beneath spandex, the creases in his face. He tries to notice how her hair is graying, tied into a loose ponytail that hangs limply past her shoulders, breasts no longer so firm or full as they were when she sashayed in front of the television cameras, bullwhip in hand, and all he can see is the Twilight Lady, her hands pinning his wrists to her bed, whispering, "You'll never put me away."

"Let," Rorschach grits out, "go."

She laughs—oh _God_, that laugh, though it carries an edge of hysteria now—and strokes his mask with the back of her hand, barely restraining him except for the knife but he's frozen, and the ink swirls in drunken patterns across his face. "Now, what would be the fun in _that_?"

"Leslie," Dan tries again, though his voice squeaks on the second syllable. "We're here to rescue you."

He regrets the words the moment they're out—stupid, always so _stupid_, why is he reduced to a stuttering idiot around her?—but she hurls Rorschach into one of the cubicles and bolts for the fire escape. "Catch me if you can," she snarls at him, and he catches her at the door, slams her into it with a ferocity that makes Dan wince, then throws her to the ground and pins her there, awkwardly positioned as he tries to keep her in place without touching her any more than he needs to.

"Midnight?" Rorschach asks her, his voice thick like he's talking through a mouthful of blood.

"It's what comes after twilight." She squirms under his grip, still deceivingly strong. Not strong enough, though, not to shake Rorschach off and get past both of them, and she knows it. "You're wasting your time, hero. There are things out there a lot worse than me."

"Know that." The inkblots knit together in concentration. "Came to save you from them. Reconsidering now." Dan hopes his partner is joking, but then, if it's hard for _him_ to tell, it'll be impossible for Leslie. "Have drawn unwanted attention. Best to come with us. Don't try anything." He releases her as if the contact burns his hands through the gloves. Dan snorts despite himself.

He almost thinks she's going to make a run for it, and she looks like she's about to. She clamors to her feet and brushes dust from her knees.

"You look like shit, Nite Owl. Why'd you go and let yourself get fat?"

"It's good to see you too." He adds, quieter: "I thought you were dead."

Rorschach opens the window and lets in the sounds of the street, a police siren wailing somewhere in the distance. "Can have reunion later. Should leave quickly. Sewers safest prospect." He moves to the fire escape and holds the door open. "After you, Miss Chadwicke."

"It's, uh. It's Mrs. Knightly now," and that stumble at the end that means she should have used past tense. Sickness rises in him, the Twilight Lady brought low, broken as the rest of them.

"Whatever you're called," Dan says, and he tries to sound gentle. "You'd better come with us."

* * *

  
The match flickers to life, breathes flame into a can stuffed with rags and newspaper. It's bright enough to see the faces—such as they are—of his companions, so Dan pushes his goggles up on his forehead and blinks into the light. He tells himself he's done this before, this hiding in shadowed and reeking places, as he gags on the stench that surrounds them.

"I was supposed to be on a flight to Pakistan the next day," Leslie is saying. There's still a threadbare giggle in her voice. "Gary…he was worried. He thought it'd be dangerous." She scratches at her cheek where the leather ends and pallid skin begins. "He didn't know about…what I did before I met him. I still had a fortune after I got out of jail, you know? Ran off to Paris, got myself a new name and everything. But I was clean. That's what you get for trying to go straight." She coughs into her sleeve. "Everyone I know died. Everyone but the fucking masks. Of all the people to survive..."

"How _did_ you survive?" Dan asks. It's cold, even with the fire. He can feel the dampness spreading through his bones.

"I was lucky, I guess. Or unlucky. I was at a party uptown, and there was this flash. I thought it was the bomb. Half the people there started eating the other half. I just…I ran out into the streets. I left my own fucking husband with his brains leaking out of his ears and I just ran. You?"

Rorschach starts, and Dan interrupts: "It's a long story."

"Need to leave city," Rorschach says. "Not safe here."

She casts him a sidelong glance. "That's really sweet. I'm starting to think that it's not actually you under that mask." She leans forward, almost into the flame, like a kid telling ghost stories only the stories are real and the ghosts won't stop pulling at their hands. "I have nothing at all to lose. Nothing. I liked the world how it was. I liked the city how it was. Six million crazy people, all eating and shitting and fucking and snorting drugs and being _alive_. This, _this_—" She waves a gloved hand at the ceiling of the utility closet. "—is no place for a villainess. Even a retired one."

"How did you find out?" Dan asks.

It might be his imagination—a lingering guilt for sins he has yet to commit—but he thinks that the inkblots are making a frown. "Don't name source," Rorschach says. "May not be secure, even here."

"I don't know anyway. I started looking, and—someone found me. Someone wants me to know who did this."

He flushes in relief and hopes that the darkness covers it. She only suspects. Someone's been giving her pieces, but she doesn't know the whole story, and that means that he doesn't have to think about killing her. He shouldn't have been thinking about it, anyway. He wasn't. He wasn't thinking that at all.

"We need to tell the world," she whispers. "We need to find whoever did this, and—" Her hands over the fire, black leather turned shades of red and gold. "It's all I've got to live for now."

"All any of us have," Rorschach says, but he doesn't give Veidt's name. It's too much to wonder what's going on in his head. The mask, Dan's unwilling pact to keep Veidt's secret, the Twilight Lady—just more walls between them, a veritable fortress. Maybe Veidt is right; maybe they're doomed to be screwed until the day of their premature deaths. "Going out. Need to think."

Which translates into a need to beat people up because he can't deal with the ever-deepening shades of grey that threaten to drown them. Dan just nods mutely and sinks against the wall.

* * *

  
"You keep calling me Leslie," she says, some time after Rorschach has left. "I don't even know your real name."

"Oh. Uh." He tells her. He's a little surprised that she doesn't know, but then, when would she have found out? He wasn't the one who put her away—that was Rorschach, who had left her tied up in the rain with her own pills scattered on the pavement around her, who hadn't understood at all why Dan had avoided him for weeks afterwards—but Dan had been at the trial, in costume no less, and she'd glared at him, accusingly, across the courtroom.

"You never gave it up," she says, all admiration now. Free from the burden of history, he thinks, free to start again. Criminals hold grudges, certainly, but not like vigilantes do. "The mask thing."

"For years. I thought forever, maybe." He shakes his head. "You don't give it up, though, do you?"

"You ever get married?" She moves closer to him, a finger trailing up his glove. Hunger flickers in her eyes, hunger and something else. Maybe it's desperation, or just sadness, the need to play at not being alone. It has nothing to do with bodies, nothing to do with the people they are now. "Never mind. You're alone now, aren't you? Or you wouldn't be hiding out in a sewer playing knight errant with Rorschach."

He jerks his arm away. "I'm not," he says. "Alone, I mean."

"Well, not literally—"

"Not in the sense you mean."

She frowns in confusion, gets it, and her frown deepens. "No."

"Don't, uh, mention that I said anything to you about it. I'm pretty sure I'd meet with a messy end."

"But…" She chuckles to herself, shakes her head. "I guess that's why it never worked out between you and me, huh?"

"It didn't work out between us because you were a drug dealer and a prostitute."

"Oh, _that_." And they grin at each other, the death-grin of too many nights in an ailing city, teeth grayed from breathing ash, and it's a relief, he thinks, confessing to her, because even if they were on different sides back then, there's someone else who understands a little now. Someone who isn't also his best friend and his partner and whatever the hell else remains between them, that sick and twisted and batshit crazy obsession. "I'm sort of—wow. I mean, he was repressed as hell back then. Wouldn't even let me…"

"I don't think you're his type."

"That didn't stop Oz—anyway. The end of the world and we're talking about sex. It figures." She pulls a few strands of hair loose from her ponytail and twists them between her fingers. "How long have you two—I mean, back then…?"

"No," Dan says. "No, it happened after. Maybe the rules changed, maybe that much death makes everyone who survives it free, in a way. How can you even get close to another person after something like that? How can you—"

"—not," she finishes. "How can you not?"

"I should go," Dan says. "He's probably out there doing something stupid right now." He stands up, and he feels the fetid air cling to him, a sheen of grunge and decay. "And I should probably stop him."

She lets him get almost to the door before asking, almost playfully: "Can I watch?"

"No," and it's still _her_, at least, even with all she's lost. "Leslie."

"Yes?"

"You should run. From me, I mean. I'm not the person you think I am."

"I know," she says, and she doesn't move from the floor.


	4. vulgar kings on their dirty thrones

**vulgar kings on their dirty thrones**

_"Let us be terrible so that the people will not have to be." – George-Jacques Danton_

The fight is over by the time Dan finds first a trail of blood, then Rorschach, shoving a man's head into a rain-filled oil drum behind a Burgers n' Borscht. As he hears Dan approach, he yanks the guy's head free and his victim coughs, spluttering water and bile, stumbles free and lopes off into the night. Rorschach watches his retreat and sinks in the frame of the delivery door, glancing down in disdain at the faux-Cyrillic letters reflected in the rain that pools in the parking lot.

"Following me?" His tone—what tone there is in that rasp—suggests that there's no point in Dan denying it. "Shouldn't leave Miss Chadwicke alone."

"She's lasted this long. I think she can take care of herself." He takes a seat beside his partner, who makes an irritated noise as he shifts to the other side of the doorstep. "You don't trust her."

"Criminal," he says. "Whore."

"That doesn't mean that she isn't on our side in this," Dan points out. Rorschach nods as though his head is too heavy for his neck to support. "You don't trust me, either."

A strained intake of breath from beneath the mask, like a straw sucking at an empty cup, and Dan knows what that sound means; after twenty years, he's an expert in weird noises, knows that Rorschach won't lie, can't lie, at least not that blatantly, and nor can he accept that Dan is the glaring exception to every one of his carefully constructed and rigidly enforced rules.

Dan reaches a hand out, but it freezes in mid-air, and he asks, "Can I?" A leaden eternity before there's another, slighter nod, and he's allowed to—cautiously, like he's reaching into a tiger's cage—run a gloved finger over the side of the mask and watch the inkblots chase his touch. No skin, he thinks, nothing human between them, and yet there's still a thrill in this, still a _want_ that's haunted the corners of his thoughts since he crossed the first line.

He tugs the mask up to just above Rorschach's upper lip, flicks his tongue along the line of a sandpaper jaw. He tastes blood; a split lip from the earlier fight with Leslie, red smeared all along the inside of the mask. He can feel Rorschach's body go rigid.

"Not like this." He starts to pull the mask all the way up, and Dan clutches his wrists and holds them in place.

"Keep it on," Dan growls.

"Can't. One thing to be faceless. No weakness with face. No sickness."

Still restraining his wrists with one hand, Dan slides the other between the folds of his partner's coat to cup the stiffness between his legs. "Yeah, uh. I don't think I believe that." He takes the bottom edge of the mask in his teeth and yanks it back down. "You told me that this was your real face."

"It is."

"Then it's—then this is you." He drags his mouth across the mask, feels the contours and angles beneath his lips. The texture is strange, more like cloth than plastic, and tastes chemical, cleaner than the rest of him. "Tell me you don't want this and I'll stop."

It's a good thing sometimes, he thinks, as the masked head bows into his chest—hat knocked, forgotten, into the neon-splashed pavement—that Rorschach is practically incapable of lying.

With the mask on, he's less aggressive than Dan would have expected, almost like he was in the beginning, weirdly uncoordinated in a new body that doesn't understand sensation, doesn't understand anything beyond brutal violence. He grabs at Dan's cape like it's a life raft, the inkblots shifting so quickly they practically blur into gray. Dan hauls Rorschach to his feet. "I didn't think so."

Dan, too, is different when he's masked.

Rorschach fiddles with the crescent buckle at his waist. "Daniel. How…?" He somehow manages to unfasten it, and Rorschach's hands claw at him, slide the codpiece down and then tug the cloak around them both like he wants to hide in its folds. There's a leathered grip around his cock, and someone gasps and he realizes that the sound came from his own mouth.

There's always the chance of discovery outside, and his partner has never been a patient man, and so, clothes and bodies slick with rain, he's lifting Rorschach into the door, sinking into a vice-grip of sinewy muscles and rage as the smaller man braces his hands on the frame and his knees around Dan's hips. Dan pumps into him in a dissonant rhythm that echoes the clang of garbage-can lids and squealing tires and slamming doors, crushed by him in an impossible heat until he can't stand it anymore and cries out into the sleeve of Rorschach's coat.

The rain carries the remnants of their sins into the pavement. Dan slumps, spent and exhausted, against the door, pulling Rorschach down with him, the ferocity in him quieted enough that Dan can whisper: "In the end, when it matters, I won't betray you. Even if…"

"Should get back," Rorschach mutters. "Raise suspicion otherwise."

"Okay," Dan tells him, and they stay like that for a while longer.

* * *

  
There are other stories besides theirs.

Connecticut and Pennsylvania have placed quotas on the amount of Manhattan refugees they'll allow to resettle, with New Jersey likely to follow suit. In a _Gazette_ interview, Redford slams the Nixon administration for not providing enough incentives for the survivors to stay, and in a _Nova Express_ interview, Veidt, his wording carefully polite, suggests that both of the two major political parties are incapable of meeting the challenges that the new paradigm, this infinitely terrifying universe, sets out for them. The latest polls show his popularity, especially in besieged and battered New York, on the rise. No one but Doug Roth will go so far as to call him a contender in the next election, but between his advocacy for the reconstruction efforts and the results of the Jerusalem peace talks, he's never far from the front pages.

In Lower Manhattan, there's a squatters' riot when the mayor announces plans to tear down the derelict buildings damaged by the monster's last flails. In a soup kitchen, spoons pause between bowl and mouth as the radio in the corner talks of hope and renewal and the red-haired homeless man in the corner mutters bitterly about entropy and decay. Even the old timers at the table beside him can't remember a spring when it's rained this much.

Utopia splits at the seams, and the city, now more than ever, looks to its great and golden son to save it. He is, it seems, everywhere at once: cutting the red tape at the Ground Zero monument, defusing the riot by personally funding a rent-controlled apartment complex for the evicted squatters, waiting for Dan in the kitchen when, in the early hours of the morning, he returns from patrol, his costume stuffed into a tattered knapsack.

"You could buy me a phone," Dan says, dropping the knapsack and kicking it to the side of the front hall. "That way, you could call in advance and you wouldn't need to break into my house."

"I have the key," Veidt says smoothly. "And it's not your house."

"I saw you on the news tonight." Dan moves over to the coffeemaker; he puts on enough for two without even thinking about it, and Veidt swivels in the kitchen chair to face him. "You're serious about this president shit?"

"You sound angry, Dan."

"The one thing that keeps me from killing you is my belief that you didn't do all of this for personal gain."

Veidt laughs. "What keeps you from killing me is that you _can't_. Speaking of which, where's Rorschach? You two didn't have a falling out, did you?"

The coffeemaker bubbles and groans. Dan reaches in the cupboard for the bag of sugar cubes, and he frowns because there is still some left, because he's been sleeping alone in an unmade bed for days and when he wakes from nightmares, the space beside him is cold. "He thought," Dan says, "we might speed things up by investigating separately."

"He's found something."

"He thinks he has."

Veidt climbs, heavily, to his feet, and for a moment he looks every one of his forty-six years, the strain of sleepless nights visible beneath his eyes, crinkles etched in his handsome face. "You're a terrible liar. I hope you're more convincing when you tell him that you're on his side. That the two of you will take me down together." He claps a hand on Dan's shoulder, and Dan flinches beneath the firm grasp. "That _is_ what you tell him, isn't it?"

Dan pours the coffee, his hands shaking, and hands Veidt one of the mugs. A friendly chat in a kitchen—that's all this is. He doesn't need to give in to his own fear. Rorschach wouldn't. "Sounds like your plan isn't going so well. Information leaks, riots…"

"Birth pangs," Veidt says. "Change is never painless."

"Do you regret it?"

The silence is long enough to mean that Veidt is considering his answer, that he might not even have an answer. "The treaties are still holding," he says. "It's still working—setbacks aside. I've freed the world, Daniel. And freedom is frightening, isn't it?" He finishes his coffee, his mouth puckering at its sweetness. "The problem with erasing God and history is that those are the only two forces that can tell you if you've done the right thing. But we muddle through nonetheless. After all, what happiness did moral certainty ever bring to anyone?"

He's at the front door, about to leave. "Adrian?"

"Yes?"

"Do you have nightmares about it?"

He turns the handle, and outside is grey and cold, a world that is a pale shadow of the one he destroyed. He doesn't need to answer; the bags beneath his eyes say enough. "The monster?" Veidt asks.

"Mostly. Sometimes…" Even as he says it, he wonders why he's admitting it to Veidt. "Sometimes it's Laurie."

"Hmm. For me it's the boy, Robert Deschaines, his fear in the last seconds of his life." As he slips out the door, he calls back, "Goodnight, Dan."

The coffee doesn't keep Dan awake for long. He dreams of broken glass, of Laurie floating away in a field of stars, and wakes to a note on his pillow and a hollowness in his heart.

* * *

The city spares no thought for those who gave it their youth.

The woman, dressed in black, fears the hours before dark. They named her, and she is no longer safe within their reach, not until night falls and she can creep into her old apartment building. She sits, shivering, waiting for photographs to slide through the gap above the floor, for the sound of footsteps retreating down the hall. She can feel her destiny bearing down on her, a small role in a great and murderous melodrama, but nevertheless, the linchpin on which the future hinges. She hears someone outside, and though she wants to throw open the door and reveal everything, she can sympathize with the need to be mysterious, knows that seeing her informant's face dooms both of them.

Across town, a man sits at his desk behind a wall of windows overlooking his city. He can go a long time without sleep; longer, when the nightmares slither at the base of his skull. The city lights stutter beneath him and he asks forgiveness of the same god he banished.

_Did I do the right thing, Jon? Did I?_

Far below, where the rain never ceases, two men who have forgotten how to speak to each other walk a spiral from Ground Zero, a ritual of pauses and almost-blurted confessions. Even now, the last stubborn vestiges of snow long-eroded into the sewers, the city belongs more to the dead than to the two that patrol its hidden places.

"Miss Chadwicke has gone home."

"You know where that is?"

Silence is affirmation. Rorschach knows and won't say. He presses against Dan's side and lets himself be led into the shadows of Central Park, the mask rolled up below his eyes so it's no longer really a disguise, just a reminder of what he is, what he's capable of. Part of Dan longs for these clandestine meetings, to lose himself in the shifting patterns and his partner's hands, cold and insistent as they search beneath his cape, as the storm builds around them. And part of him knows that he's only losing Rorschach again, like he did a decade ago, that his friend is retreating into the guise of an impossible ideal, into muttered half-sentences and sudden outbursts of violence. Dan, in a moment of courage, slides one of the purple gloves loose to capture Rorschach's hand—to make himself believe, he thinks, that there is still a man under there. He's punched something or someone so hard that his fingernails are chipped and dusted with his own blood, turned black in the glare of Dan's goggles. He touches them to his lips and copper dissolves on his tongue.

"Daniel," a warning, but his arms coil around Dan's neck, and they stumble into the wrought-iron underside of a bridge. Rorschach's breath is sour against his mouth, the ground beneath them treacherous with mud and last year's leaves. He tries to find his footing on the wet gravel of the path, but his boots slip with the urgent, arrhythmic rocking of his partner's hips against his leg. Rorschach growls his name again, and this time, he thinks it might be encouragement.

"You would like this," Dan mutters. "What a fucking mess." Teeth close around his bottom lip and then the only thing he can manage is a gasp.

He pushes Rorschach into the slippery bank, tugging his shirt open to press muddy handprints across his undershirt, pushing aside a pang of worry at how easily the pinstriped pants slide down his hips. He tries to tease a little, swirling his tongue over the head of Rorschach's cock, but his partner clenches fistfuls of his hair and makes incomprehensible noises and Dan takes him into his mouth, chokes on the taste of soil and salt until Rorschach shudders to climax. His own erection falters and suddenly he's being dragged up, and it's the ungloved hand that closes around his length, stroking him until all he can see is afterimages, black and white chasing each other across the inside of his eyelids.

For some time they lie there, cradled in the earth and the scent of vegetable rot. There's a streak of muck on Rorschach's mask that reminds Dan of a bloodstain, and he reaches to wipe it off. Rorschach grunts and yanks the mask back down. The bottom of his trenchcoat catches and tears as he climbs, unsteadily, to his feet.

"Where are you going?" And when Rorschach doesn't answer, he knows it's to find Leslie, to wait until her source reveals itself, to guard her from whatever stands in the way of her and her next printed accusation.

Even if it's Dan who stands in the way. "Don't follow," Rorschach says.

"No, I know." He watches his partner retreat into the rain. "And then you'll come home?" he calls out, but the rain drowns out the response, if it comes at all.


	5. Children of Manhattan

**Children of Manhattan**

_  
"And you, you stand watch, you are one of the guardians. You meet your fellow by stirring the lighted wood in the pile of twigs beside you. Why do you stand watch? Someone has to stand guard, they say…Someone must be present." — Franz Kafka_

This time, Leslie isn't subtle, or cautious, or anything else that might save her life. The new issue of _Midnight Notes_—which details, with fatal accuracy, Veidt's entire plot, the blood that feeds his fragile peace—flutters like dry leaves over the sidewalks, floats down the gutters and clogs storm drains in soggy heaps.

No one notices. No one rises up in protest and demands the head of Adrian Veidt. She signs her death warrant in cheap and fading ink, and the world marches past her, another sad, unknown lunatic with a theory that would be laughable were it not in such poor taste. She might as well pace the streets carrying a doomsday placard for all of the attention she garners.

It says something good about New Yorkers, Dan thinks grimly, that none believe that a human could do this. Their faith is stronger than his own.

Days pass, and Dan waits by the window. The furniture is covered by a thin film of dust, barely touched. Rorschach is smart enough to avoid their gilded cage; Dan knows he probably won't come back, that looking for him is pointless. So he waits, instead, for word of Leslie's victory or, he thinks, for news of her death.

There's a press conference, one of so many these days, but it's Veidt so Dan listens from the kitchen while the television blares in the living room. In the drone of questions he recognizes a voice.

It isn't Leslie Chadwicke, isn't the Twilight Lady, though the lilt is still there, the birdlike cock of her head, the exaggerated contrapposto that makes her look more like the pin-up villainess she was than like Gale Knightly, camerawoman-turned-underground-journalist. _What do you say to the accusations that you were responsible for the monster's creation?_—accusations few have read and fewer have believed, and when Veidt, laughing uncomfortably, starts to deny it, she pulls a tiny revolver from her purse and fires six times at the podium.

This is how Veidt wins, four months after he gave mankind his terrible gift.

The bullets dodged, without effort, the deranged former nemesis dragged away, screaming, to the New York State Psychiatric Hospital, her story—one of many conspiracy theories in the wake of a disaster that no human mind can truly comprehend—buried, a footnote in the many interwoven stories that will no doubt emerge from New York's ashes. For now: a curious news item to be printed in the back of the _Gazette_, the retired vice queen's bizarre assault on a man who has poured his wealth into rebuilding the city.

Dan sinks into his couch, and it's an hour since the press conference—the broadcast is a repeat—and there was yet another period of time that's passed where he'd already lost before realizing it. It's almost a relief, he thinks, to have been on the other side of the borough, to not have been tempted. And maybe he's wrong, maybe Veidt doesn't win after all, maybe no one ever wins and the great Ozymandias sleeps as badly as Dan does.

When, some time later, he walks down to the dumpster and hooks his fingers beneath the lid handle, he already knows he'll find a note there. Two addresses, the first one circled and the barely-legible scrawl: "Here first."

He wonders whether Rorschach will want to spring Leslie, either to enlist her in his one-man war or to put her on a bus to someplace she might be safe, or whether he knows, as Dan does, that she's almost certainly better off where she is, where even Veidt can't find her and force her to reveal her source. Or maybe his truce with her was only temporary and he still believes she ought to be locked up.

There's no point in dwelling on it for long, he tells himself, as he reaches for his overcoat and not for his costume. He'll find out soon enough.

* * *

  
He thinks that the burnt-out brownstone might have had tenants once, but they must have fled long before the monster. The sidewalk and concrete steps leading up to the door leak garbage and yellowed weeds, the grey keystones blackened with soot. What glass remains in the windows is heat-warped and cracked.

He has to break in, but it's only a formality, like ringing a doorbell would be for a normal person. The rotted wood gives before the lock does. "It's me," Dan says, and his voice echoes up the stairs. He doesn't need to check the numbers on the apartment doors; one is slightly ajar, and framed by the only light in the building. The hallway smells like something died in it, and as he slips into the room, closing the door behind him, the other, more distinctive scent that settles over him is almost a comfort.

Dan wonders if all of the candles, stubby and wedged into beer bottles, that are scattered on windowsills and the broken stove are there because electricity still hasn't been restored to this South Bronx neighborhood, or because Rorschach is _trying_, he is, but he doesn't understand social rituals any more than he gets why canned beans should be heated up before being eaten.

This was his apartment, when he was a child and hid from his mother's shadow. Dan is sure of it without asking, and he sits down on the cracked wooden chair, the floor creaking under his weight, and thinks that whatever the hell brought Rorschach back here can't possibly be good.

"Brought takeout," Rorschach says as he emerges from the kitchen, and Dan is relieved until he sees that it's scavenged from the soup kitchen; days-old bread and canned meat, but he hides his distaste and slides onto the floor because there's no table and only the one chair. They've eaten worse.

"Thanks," Dan says. He gestures vaguely at the candles. "Is this a date?" It's the wrong thing to say—insulting, even—but Rorschach doesn't flinch. It's been such a long time since Dan's seen him without the mask that he's almost forgotten how unnerving his partner's eyes are. Dan chews on a torn-off stub of bread, tough and stale, to avoid saying anything else that's stupid.

"Need to talk."

He gives up on the bread. "I know," he says, though part of him whispers that there can't be anything left to talk about, that all that's left is to accept defeat, and since Rorschach won't ever do that—"The second address…?"

"Miss Chadwicke's. Source will be waiting."

"The source?" He'd almost forgotten that there was another person out here, somewhere, still in danger, some other poor bastard who's braver or more stubborn than he is. "Does it even matter now?"

"Matters," and Dan pretends that Rorschach's voice sounds like it always does and there's no catch in the monotone, no hesitation. Rorschach knows who Leslie's informant was—has probably known for awhile, maybe before he followed her home—and doesn't want to say that he's kept silent because he doesn't trust Dan.

For some time they sit on the floor, on a cigarette-burned rug, staring at each other with the remains of dinner between them and the candlelight slowly dying.

"I won't say anything," Dan says. "I told you I wouldn't betray you. And whoever it is—they tried to do the right thing. I won't betray that person either."

"Know that, Daniel. Good. Not like me."

"The hell's gotten into you, man?" He reaches out for Rorschach's hand, but his partner—ex-partner again, maybe, with how cagey and unpredictable he's been lately—jerks away and stands up to lean against the peeling wall. Dan follows him, stands closer than he should, close enough to tell that Rorschach is shaking, and after everything they've seen, everything they've _done_, he doesn't want to know what it is that can make his friend tremble _now_. "Rorschach. Will you look at me?"

It takes some prompting, and his hand barely touching the sandpaper jaw, but he manages to get the smaller man to look up. He immediately wishes that he hadn't—those aren't Rorschach's _real_ eyes, and they stare through him blankly.

Still, he tries. "You're good, Rorschach. You're the best person I know—" and that, too, is the wrong thing to say; everyone he knows is dead or insane or evil. "—and I wouldn't have made it, not after what Veidt did, if you hadn't been there." He's about to keep talking, to spill everything—how he was lost for so long after his retirement, how he had no purpose and no passion until he came home and found Rorschach in his kitchen telling him that the Comedian was dead, how even though the world is over he has that one scrap of his old life to cling to and now it's everything to him—when there's a throat-clearing "eenk" and he bites it back.

"Should have been pure." Rorschach's fingers twist the sleeve of Dan's sports coat. "Beyond this…perversion. Moral. Like you."

"Uh…" It can't be that simple, he thinks. It never is. "I don't know what you think _I've_ been doing for the past few months, but it hasn't exactly been pure." He almost laughs, except that Rorschach is serious, brought him here and tried to act like he thinks people in a relationship or whatever it is they have act, is trying to actually _talk_ to Dan for once, and if he's failing, it isn't for lack of effort. "Rorschach, for Christ's sake. Do you think there was ever anyone who put on a goddamned mask who _wasn't_ some kind of a deviant?"

"Normal, before. Did this to save me."

He was always obsessive, Dan thinks, even before he broke completely, always so single-minded and in a way, that was what had drawn Dan—who could never make up his mind about anything—to him. Like he was always burning up and the only way to keep him here, just for a little longer, was to catch a part of that flame. Was that what he'd thought the first time, when he'd hauled Rorschach off a top-knot's body and kissed him? He can't remember having been thinking anything at all.

"Maybe that's how it started," Dan admits. "You can't possibly think that's what it is now."

"Truth exposed. No need to hide. No need—" He flicks out a hand towards the last fading candle. "—for this. Can have good life now, Daniel."

He clasps Rorschach's shoulder. "That's what I'm trying to do."

"No. Not right. Miss her."

He almost asks, "Who?"—but, Laurie, of course. Laurie, who had left him devastated, alone, if Rorschach hadn't been there to give him a reason to keep fighting. "Oh. Yeah, I do. But you can miss someone and even still love someone and move—" Rorschach is still staring past him, and Dan's suddenly uneasy, because as fucked-up and miserable as his partner is, he isn't exactly the type to go fishing for reassurances. And though Dan knows that sometimes when he wakes up from a nightmare it's Laurie he calls out for, Rorschach has always been careful not to invoke her loss.

Dan pulls his hand away, and now the shaking seems to have infected him, too.

"Rorschach?" His heart thuds against his ribs. "Why—why would you bring her up?"

But the address is still in his pocket, the second address, and someone is waiting for him there, someone who knew enough to tell Leslie everything, and there were four of them there, four of them whom Veidt spared, who were given the choice between silence and destruction.

"I need to go," Dan whispers. "I need—I'll be back, okay?" He staggers, his limbs no longer entirely under his control, to the chair where he's thrown his coat, and he tries not to look back.

If he did, Rorschach would still be standing there, his voice flat as he tells the closing door: "Daniel. Not what you think."

* * *

  
There's police tape around Leslie's apartment so Dan waits outside as dawn breaks over the skyline. The buildings are suffused with red and gold; the clouds receding for the first time in weeks. Dan takes to pacing one city block, then two, and after some time he notices that there's a figure walking the opposite sidewalk, dressed in a black hoodie that's pulled over its face, a few steps ahead of him.

He almost collides with a taxi as he dashes across the street, and it's enough pause to tell him something is wrong, to let him see shadows that fall in the wrong places, or no, it's not that, it's that a shadow is _missing_ and what sort of person doesn't cast one except—

_Not what you think._

—there was a dream, but his dreams are never just dreams these days, and he squeezes his eyes shut because when he opens them the world will be back to normal and the face beneath the hood won't shine, the voice that is almost _her_ voice but isn't won't say, detached: "He didn't tell you, did he?"

"I, uh…" She's still there when he works up the courage to open his eyes again. It's hard to make out her features; he thinks the birthmark is still there, a speck of indigo that refuses to glow. "…Laurie?"

"Keep walking," and she does, and he runs after her; his legs are longer but somehow she's faster and he has to struggle to keep up. He can't tell if she's walking at all—she moves like Jon did, as though she's not really moving, as if reality itself bends to let her pass.

"What did he _do_ to you?"

"I asked him to. I begged him, and he—well, Jon doesn't beg." They reach a hiding place, finally, the courtyard of a church that's hidden from the street and empty in the early hours of morning. "But he didn't want to make me like him." She stands in front of him, taller now, and he could almost touch her. Just a few steps—but he doesn't. He won't. "I didn't want you to find out this way, Dan. I didn't want you to find out at all."

He has so many questions, bubbling up all at once and all he can do is sink against the stone wall that outlines the courtyard, fight the tears that blot his vision, and the words choke and die in his throat.

"I saw it." Her voice, like the ringing of a distant bell, like how a goddess would sound if such a creature existed. "Not days, not weeks after it happened, but right then and there. He brought me back in the middle of it. All those people, drowning in blood…I wanted to die, then. I wanted to burn out everything human in me. I wanted to tear out my own eyes because if I never saw again it would be better than seeing that."

"So he changed you." He spits it out, hoping bitterness can overpower grief.

"I can see now, as he does. I can live in the moments before it happened, when they were all alive, when you and I were—" She's right there, kneeling beside him, and her hands, smooth and perfect, fall on either side of his face. He expects them to be cold, but it's more that they take on the heat in his cheeks. "You can't understand. I couldn't, before. It isn't like I thought; it isn't like being disconnected. I've seen the universe, Dan, and it's so beautiful. Everything's so beautiful. Everything is connected." Her eyes are white and filled with starlight. "Don't cry, Dan. Please."

"You left," he said. "You left, and when you came back you didn't even—you went to _Leslie_, you—"

"And you kept going, and you were stronger than you ever thought you could be." She sits, and for a moment he thinks that it's _his_ Laurie, so familiar is presence that warms his side, the way she rests her arm over her knees like she's about to raise her pipe to her lips. "You think I stopped loving you. I didn't. There is no past, no end. None of us ever stop loving."

"Then why…" The tears threaten to drown out his words again, and he's almost grateful for them, because even if she can command space and matter she can't make him stop feeling this. "Why come back at all?"

"To save the world." She sounds almost surprised that he's asked, even though she probably knows how their entire conversation—how their entire lives—will unfold. "Life is—amazing. So amazing. And rarer than you can imagine. There is nothing in the universe like this time, this place." Her fingers on him again, smoothing back his stupid hair. "These people. It must be preserved at all costs, even if we have to lie to keep the bombs asleep in their silos. You agreed, the same as I did."

"But you told."

There's still smoke in her voice, even with its new and strange echo. "Veidt was wrong. He thought he could keep it silent, but he's still human. Even if he'd killed all of us, the truth would have come out eventually, and humanity would go back to slaughtering itself. He doesn't understand how these things work—he only sees the overarching structures. He can't be bothered with ugly details and coincidences and chance. It's all logic, except people aren't logical, and they don't behave like he thinks." She shakes her head. "Jon can see sub-atomic particles and Veidt can see how to end war and Rorschach can see a murder scene from a speck of blood, and you—well. None of you guys could see how the human heart works. You can't suppress truth by burying it. But by speaking it—"

He should feel betrayed, he thinks. Outraged. There's a cold fist in his chest, squeezing so that he can't breathe properly. Laurie is back, right there beside him, only it isn't Laurie, it's some stranger who keeps Laurie's face hidden beneath her glowing skin. "If the truth is so absurd that no one would ever believe it; if the person speaking it is someone who can be discredited…that's why it was Leslie, wasn't it? Because she was nuts and had a criminal past and you used her as a _pawn_."

"You're angry. Don't be angry. The world is safe now, and no one had to die for it." She stands up and reaches out her hand. He takes it, grudgingly, and maybe she's right, even if he has to hate her a little for it. "You're safe."

"There's something I don't think you know," he begins, but he can't, and besides, she's still speaking.

"You won't ever see the universe as I do, or as Jon does, but try to imagine. It isn't so bad. All around us, the dead are returning to earth, to the cosmos. Three million here, and millions more in places you'll never go, reunited with the force that gave them life. That's the great secret, Dan, that's why Jon always smiled a little, even when things were at their worst. Nothing—no one—is ever truly lost."

For a second he almost _is_ comforted by the thought, and then he's gripped again by doubt. "Laurie," he says. "Why are you telling me this?" His brain does a series of quick calculations—how long it would take Rorschach to get downtown to Veidt's office, whether he'd be _that_ stubborn when he must know that it's over, that even in death he can't win, and of course that's no deterrent, it never could be…"Laurie, where's Rorschach? When you saw him, did he say anything weird; I mean, weirder than usual?" When she still doesn't answer, he mutters, "Ohgod."

Her arms around him, strangers now, not lovers, but still connected, and around him everything is bright, like it is in his dreams. Flashes of other worlds: a mushroom cloud rising above the city, a hat, abandoned, in the snow. "It's different every time," she murmurs, and he can't believe that he thought for a second that the emotion was gone from her voice. "But some things can't be changed. Or maybe it's only we who change, and time continues, with or without us."

"Take me to him," Dan says. "You can do that, right? It's how you got back to Earth."

"And if you don't save him?" Laurie replies. "If you are too late?"

The words gush free, like a severed artery, each request more absurd and incoherent than the next, to tell him what happens, how it ends, to send him back in time, to tear the humanity out of him and let him inhabit the eternal _now_ where she lives.

At last, he whispers, "Send me there anyway. If I can't do anything, if I can't stop him…let me at least be there."

There is no such thing as time or space, only a searing heat that scatters him into particles, and everything goes white.

* * *

  
Dan falls to his knees, retching wet starch onto a polished floor, vomit burning his mouth as he pushes back against the pain and nausea. He manages a few stairs on the frozen escalator before there's a body, one of Veidt's guards, his gun still in his holster—Dan grabs it, even if it's useless—and his throat ripped out. He looks behind him and sees the other corpse, face down in the lobby fountain.

The escalator is a better bet than the elevator, he tells himself, even in his less-than-ideal shape. He leans heavily on the railing—no wonder Laurie hated this, the churning sickness as every molecule in his body settles back into place—and follows the crimson boot prints upstairs.

His lungs are bursting by the time he reaches Veidt's office, and he has time to wonder if he's pushed himself too far, if the cramp in his left side is a heart attack. But there's a thump inside, the sound of a fist hitting flesh, and it means that Laurie was wrong, that he's not too late, and he presses against the doorframe to catch his breath.

Veidt's voice carries above the noise. "This is all so unnecessary," he is saying. "You're no threat to me anymore. You've helped me, even if it was unintentional; it all went so much better than planned. I don't want you dead."

"Not," the growl, audible even with the wall and the mask between them, "mutual."

"Oh, for pity's sake." Dan hears a crack: bone, splintering, a muffled hiss. He edges around the side of the door to see Rorschach on his knees at Veidt's feet, his arm twisted at an unnatural angle and the bile rises in his gut again even as he wills himself to stay still, to think this one out. "You lost. The world won. There's no shame in it—" A movement, too quick for Dan to catch, but Rorschach gasps in pain. "—not in fighting well for a bad cause. But it's over. Find some other reason to live besides revenge."

"No other reason."

"Hm. I'm sure that's why your partner is right outside, thinking that he's going to ambush me. Drop the gun, Daniel, you know it won't do any good."

Dan lets the gun fall with a clatter and kicks it across the floor. Rorschach grabs it before Veidt can and slams it into his throat, frees himself in the split second where his adversary rallies and climbs back on his feet. Dan runs for them and suddenly he's in the air, hurled against Veidt's desk to land in an undignified heap, his head still spinning. Rorschach manages to get a few one-armed jabs in before Veidt's clawed hand slashes across his face, taking the lower half of the mask with it. Ink bleeds sluggishly from the rent fabric and Dan is sure that the keening whine that escapes his partner's lips is the worst thing he's ever heard.

"You know what your problem is?" Veidt says, dodging blows as Rorschach batters at him, a wild animal, a dark and filthy specter incongruous in the immaculate, gleaming palace. "You don't know your own limits. You still fight like you're twenty, and you're not. You think you can overcome pain because you ignore it." He strikes, once, and Rorschach goes skidding past Dan into the floor-to-ceiling windows. "Might work on the streets, but in here, you're just a—"

He's interrupted by a crash as Rorschach squirms out from under his grasp and pushes his chair through the window. Wind rushes into the office, cold against Dan's face, snapping him back to alertness. He crawls to his knees in time to see Rorschach pinning Veidt against the jagged wreckage of the window, ink and blood dripping from his ruined face.

The city lies below them, hungry and waiting. "Poetic justice, Rorschach?" Veidt asks.

"Could say that," and with all his remaining strength, shoves Veidt off the edge of the floor.

But Veidt is faster, smarter, than either of them. His hand snakes out to grab the iron bar and hoist himself up. "You've left me with no choice," and Dan almost believes he regrets it as he lifts Rorschach by the lapel of his trenchcoat and throws him to a city that, at last, welcomes him home.

* * *

  
Dan rushes Veidt and slams him against the bars, a shard of broken glass gripped in his fist, and still, he doesn't look down because if he doesn't look, maybe Rorschach is hanging off the side of the building, maybe there's a rope or a scaffold and maybe he's somewhere other than in a bloody splatter on the sidewalk below, and maybe then it doesn't matter that Dan couldn't save him. "Go on, then," Veidt says. "Do it, if you can. Rorschach would."

He lets the glass cut, just a little, even as it slices into his own palm. Veidt is mortal; he bleeds, golden skin parting at the translucent edge as it presses against his throat, and they both know that he's the one allowing this—that he can reach up and snap Dan's neck before the glass sinks deeper— because the grief that weighs down on Dan's shoulders, a grey and heavy veil that squeezes his breath into barely suppressed sobs, is a curiosity to him. Veidt has felt love, a great and all-encompassing love that consumes everything it touches, but never this, never rage, never despair.

"I'm not Rorschach," Dan says, though he doesn't loosen his grip.

"That much is abundantly clear," Veidt replies. "You have a sense of self-preservation."

He wonders if Veidt wants to die. He can feel the pulse beneath his fingers, rapid and hot. He's had his hands around another man's throat before, knows where to cut, where to apply pressure—and he never has. Can't, though he thinks that Veidt deserves worse if he could manage it.

A voice in his head—Rorschach's voice, if he's honest with himself—taunts him. Too soft, too slow, too willing to let others get their hands dirty. The only punishment Veidt will ever face waits beneath them, and Dan is too weak to deliver him to it, lost his chance the second he hesitated if he ever had it at all.

"It's what he'd want," the words almost seductive. "To wipe the slate clean so that it's only you left standing. Divine violence, absolution, perfect and just."

The wind howls and turns suffocatingly hot as though the air itself has risen against them, bearing down on them both. He feels Veidt shudder under him and their positions are reversed before he can so much as put up a half-hearted struggle, the other man's muscled arms bending his around the beam, his bulk crushing Dan's lungs. One slip, he thinks, and it's over. But Veidt is careful; Veidt doesn't want to kill him. High above the shell-shocked and fearful world he's created, his masterfully realized vision, he is, in his own way, as lonely and bereft as Dan is.

"There is no justice, Adrian," Dan wheezes out. "Not anymore."

"Do you want to join him?" Even as he says it, Veidt releases him and steps away. He leans into his desk, rubbing at his bloodied neck, and Dan eyes the gun on the floor and wonders if he'd be fast enough. It's not like he gets to tie up the bad guy and call the cops this time, not when it's Ozymandias who has only thwarted his fourth assassination attempt—and this one by a wanted fugitive—in as many months. "You must hate me."

It's a betrayal to not go down fighting Veidt with his last breath, to return to his drab and quiet life while braver men die and crueler men reshape the world in their own image.

"You're just going to walk away?"

"Even if we're alone, even if this world has made us into monsters—I won't be. Someone must—"

Every step is an effort as he drags himself that last distance to stand by the window, his city, innocent of the death that rains upon it, even more of a struggle to force himself—he owes this to Rorschach, his friend would never have turned away—to look down, but before he can, he's blown clear across the room as the sky cracks open and the entire wall of the skyscraper is blasted into vapor.

"—rise above this."

* * *

  
It's _her_. Laurie, or whatever she is now, rising to meet them as the sky boils and turns black and the lights of the city fizzle out. He can't see properly, and he lifts his hands to his face and he realizes that it's because the lenses of his glasses have been blown apart.

He should look at her, beautiful and terrible, the air crackling and bending around her, her light a halo to his blurred vision. But his attention is grabbed instead by the body draped across her arms, and he no longer cares that Veidt is _right there_, that the early-morning commuters are looking up to witness the birth of a new god, that he could pick up the gun and end everything now. All he sees is that, when she lowers Rorschach to the floor, he huffs in vague acknowledgment of the omnipotent being that saved his life, picks up his hat from where it fell, and claws the edge of the desk to pull himself into a shaky fighting stance, his thin lips curling in a ink-stained scowl.

Half-blinded, Dan stumbles against the wall. Edges around Laurie, who burns strange and cold above the floor, framed by the scorched charcoal of the skyline. _You couldn't have told me?_ he wants to shout at her, but his voice would be lost in the wind. He manages, somehow, to reach his partner's side, and that's enough; Rorschach clings to him for support, battered and exhausted but alive, his fingers digging into Dan's arm with strength enough to bruise.

He wills his partner not to move, almost hopes he'll collapse rather than trying to take on Veidt again, fearing that if the brief contact ceases he'll stop being real. He slides closer to press his face into the shoulder of his partner's coat, its acrid smell more convincing than the indistinct blur before his eyes.

"Need you," Rorschach hisses at him. "Can't fight him alone."

"Don't," Dan mouths over the sound of the storm. "I need you too." He can't tell if Rorschach hears him, or cares. He can feel his partner's muscles tremble, poised to spring but too weak to do much more than sway on his feet.

Laurie drifts through them; in her wake they are ghosts, hollow and ragged amid broken glass that sparkles like diamonds. They don't belong here. Veidt turns, slowly, and the wind is extinguished with one last thunderclap.

"You always had a flare for the melodramatic," Veidt says. "It doesn't become you." He folds his arms over his chest and stares up at her, cool and unafraid. "I wouldn't have thought that it would be you, Laurel."

"Disappointed?"

"Hmm." A small and secretive smile. "Not anymore. This is it, then?"

She doesn't need to answer. The air buckles beneath her hands, a shockwave that sends them both sprawling into the desk, but Veidt stands motionless as she drifts towards him.

"Your secret is safe," the thing-that-was-Laurie tells him. "I made certain of it. Your works will survive you. Across the universe, in places where life is only beginning to stir, in farther places where the dust gathers into planets—someone will know of Adrian Veidt, the man who ended war."

Veidt laughs. "But I'm not needed. Am I?"

"You would be God," she says. "That's never a good idea."

Rorschach tugs at Dan's arm, a painful stagger forward, one last try to be the instrument of justice that sweeps Veidt from the world. Hopeless, they both know it, and they both know he has to try, and Dan is grateful for the tattered remains of his mask, that if there's madness or tears in his eyes it is hidden behind melting black, grateful for the damper that his own faded vision affords him. He's seen enough. He pulls Rorschach to face him and stares into the still-shifting patterns, reaches down and grabs the gloved hand by the wrist and slides their fingers together.

And so he doesn't see if, for an instant, fear crosses Veidt's face as he says, "I leave the world in good hands. Take care of it," though he knows that the words are meant for him. He doesn't hear what Laurie whispers right before she takes Veidt into her embrace.

The light surrounds them, fills their skin to show the bones beneath, to sketch their embrace in black against a blaze of white. _How frail we are,_ he thinks, _how human_, and Rorschach squeezes his hand as the world explodes.

* * *

  
Steam, wavering and hazy, rises from the floor. Dan coughs. His mouth is dry with ash. He can hear his own rapid breathing, listens as he inhales for Rorschach's harsh gasps. Laurie—Laurie isn't breathing at all. She doesn't need to breathe. She will never breathe again.

Rorschach launches himself at her with a wordless animal scream. His fist passes through her as if through smoke, shadowboxing while she merely steps aside with a serene smile. He must know, Dan thinks, how pointless this is, how easily she could kill him too, just by thinking it, and still he rages at her, still snarls: "Had no _right_."

"He killed half of New York," she says, as if it doesn't even matter to her. "He murdered my father. Are you angry because you weren't the one to kill him, or because I didn't let him kill you too?"

Dan suspects it's both, or maybe something else, maybe that justice can't be that clean, that instantaneous, that it must be hard-won, throttled free from a criminal's throat by bloodstained hands in a pool of beer and piss. That Rorschach has to believe, if in nothing else, that they are beyond the whims of gods. He sinks into the floor at her knees, slides his hand through the shards of glass that litter the floor, and from behind the mask comes a sound that Dan has heard only once before, in the snowy graveyard of Veidt's Antarctic garden.

"Laurie," Dan whispers, helpless.

As he approaches the odd tableau, Laurie's voice resonates in the back of his skull; he wonders if Rorschach hears it too, but his friend gives no indication that he hears anything at all. "It takes me centuries to return to that place, to revisit that moment, those promises we made. And even longer to figure out the answer, to come back and cut through the Gordian Knot." She moves past them, to Veidt's desk, to pick up one of the action figures sprawled over it, turning it over in her hand as if seeing one for the first time. "Now it can begin. Now you can rebuild."

"Rebuild," he echoes. He splays a hand over Rorschach's back; the smaller man is shaking, the ink moving across the ragged shreds of his mask in jerking stop-motion. So absurd to suggest that anything of the city, anything of _them_, remains. "And you?"

"I won't be used as a tool, like Jon was." She stands at the edge of the floor. Sirens flood the stilled air, shouts from the street below, a police loudspeaker warning people away from the crumbling building. They don't have much time. "This world is too fragile to be inhabited by people who can live forever." She turns, bathed in the red light of a police airship. "I can't stay."

"But…" He couldn't end the sentence if he tried—of course she can't stay. This is not a place for impossible things, for impossible people. She has seen centuries fall away like leaves from a dying tree, seen the death of their world and the birth of new suns far beyond the places where mankind can dream, and what are the few short years he knew her, the fewer days that she loved him, measured against that?

"You can come with me," Laurie tells him. "If you want. Jon wouldn't mind. You could live forever and wander the stars."

"Daniel." Rorschach's mumble is barely audible, and Dan squeezes his forearm in reassurance. Laurie, resplendent in sapphire, holds her hands out to the city, and they cower in the place where her shadow should have been.

"But," she says, "you're about to tell me that you won't, that you can't leave this place. You owe something to it, despite its ugliness and horror and pain. Because it is your city, and because you will always try to save it, because you have to believe that it's possible for it to _be_ saved."

"Laurie—" He almost doesn't, but: "What happens, Laurie? If I stay, if…"

She laughs. "You're asking me if you'll be okay? If it all ends well?" She casts a sidelong glance at Rorschach. "Don't be so naïve. Nothing ever ends well. If I tell you that your future and my past are simultaneous, that every decision is set in stone, that you both live happily ever after or if worse things are still before you and a time will come when we will all wish that we had died that night in New York—would it change your answer? Would you believe yourself less free?"

Rorschach bristles; Dan murmurs, more to him than to Laurie, "No."

"Then goodbye, Dan," she says, and he wants to think there's sadness in her words, maybe even regret. "And tell my mother I—no, don't tell her anything. She wouldn't understand."

He stares after her for longer than he should as she turns from him and walks into the fog, across the sky until she becomes a pinpoint of light, a distant star that pierces the clouds. He watches until he hears Rorschach clear his throat from the floor.

"Police here. Should leave. Not likely to accept explanation of events." The monotone is back, and he's not sure whether to be relieved or worried.

"What happened just now…"

"Forget it. Nothing happened." He grabs Dan's arm to pull himself to his feet, sucking air through his teeth as he tries to pull the frayed mask across his face.

"Right," Dan replies. "Nothing happened," and pulls him close, holds him as best he can without further aggravating his injuries, ignoring the annoyed noises he makes and the liquid, viscous and bitter, that floods his mouth when he presses his lips to Rorschach's clenched teeth. It isn't much of a kiss, he thinks, but it's enough that he can still touch the guy at all. "I thought you were dead, you bastard," he says as he draws away. "Don't ever do that to me again."

Rorschach shrugs, reaches up to tips his hat low over his face. "Hazard of profession." A pause, then: "Came back."

"You thought I wouldn't?" They walk, leaning on each other, out of Veidt's crumbling temple, down a fire escape while the cops converge around the other side of the building. The sky is still dark, though it must be afternoon, and the shadows between skyscrapers conceal their slow and painful flight. Not free, Dan thinks, but no longer bound to the dead either.

"Hurm. Thought…"

"You're stuck with me, Rorschach. I just turned down immortality for you."

"Why?"

He stops abruptly. "The hell if I know sometimes. You're psychotic and you're a fascist and you—you piss me off like no one else can, and—" He lets his arm drop to his friend's side, parting the folds of the mangled coat to embrace him. "—you never gave up on me, not even when I gave up on myself. Not me, and not the world either."

"No," Rorschach says hoarsely. "Never could."

Dan holds him there for a moment, close enough that he can see him clearly though his vision is soft at the edges. Slowly, Dan peels back his mask, reveals unblinking eyes deep-set in a weather-beaten face. Traces his finger over the drying bloodstains—_butterfly_, he thinks, a grin twitching at the side of his mouth—for a moment, Rorschach isn't ugly, isn't damaged; he is strong and whole, an afterimage of the lost man Dan still searches for.

"Then even if it takes years," Dan whispers, "even if it takes the rest of our lives…I won't give up on you either."


	6. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

_"Ni dieu ni maître!" — Auguste Blanqui_

_Rorschach's journal. March 21, 1986:_

_Quiet, too quiet. Rain perhaps too much even for criminal element. Like to think scum is running scared, that rumors have reached their ears already. Back on streets. Comedian's death avenged, if not by me. Can sleep easier tonight. They fear me, still._

_Glad to hear you have also resumed operations. Will be much needed voice of sanity in days to come. Liberal weeklies lauding Veidt's legacy, proclaim modern-day sainthood and look for successor to provide same smug platitudes and concessions. Talk with condescension about resurgence of interest in masks as Red tanks patrol New York. Even Dreiberg apparently hopeful enough to believe world will last long enough for these pages to be filled._

_Don't share optimism. Need it anyway._

_City heals as men do, new skin tougher, harder, concealing rot below. Scarred, diseased, but alive. Its gods, monsters, kings, all slain, all banished. Remain only broken men in fallen world. All that is left to save it._

"I thought I'd find you up here."

Rorschach, crouched on a milk crate on the roof of their latest hideout, looks almost guilty and folds the journal closed. Dan pulls up another one to sit beside him as the sun's dying light scatters across the wet rooftops, awkwardly balancing two bottles on his knees. He's spent most of the week across town, working on Archie. The scent of motor oil clings to him and rings his fingernails black no matter how many times he washes his hands. He likes the smell; it reminds him of Hollis, and besides, they've stopped making the cologne he used to wear. "Let's stay in, okay? Give the criminals a night off."

Rorschach stares down at the journal for a moment, tracing his fingers over the cover, and _hurms_ before tucking it back into his coat. Dan adds, unable to suppress the amusement in his tone: "It's on your arrest report, Rorschach. I looked it up, since you never tell me anything."

He huffs. "Thank you."

"I brought drinks." He holds the bottle while Rorschach digs in his pockets for sugarcubes and crumbles them into the Coke. Their fingertips touch for a moment as Rorschach takes it from him with a nod of acknowledgment. Dan clinks his own bottle of cheap champagne against the glass. "Cheers."

They toast to absent friends, to Hollis and Blake and Nelson and even, he thinks, to Veidt, despite everything. Rorschach, drinking Coke with one arm in a cast and unkempt curls spilling over his eyes, looks like an overgrown kid in the gathering dusk. In the morning, when Dan stirs beside him and drapes an arm over his body to quiet his nightmares, he will notice, for the first time, the speckles of grey at his temples. He will touch the bite marks on his collarbone lovingly and nestle back down against his partner's freckled shoulder, resisting daylight as long as he can.

They sit together as the night music of the city overtakes any conversation they might have had—a street cleaner, sweeping dead petals from a memorial wreath, the grind of a tank's treads over cracked asphalt, the distant lament of a saxophone—and without him being aware of it, Rorschach's gloved hand covers his own where it rests on his worn jeans.

He imagines them outside of history, beyond the passage of time, overlooking a lattice of streetlights and neon signs that blot out the stars, the city's wounded heart cradled in their calloused palms. They hold watch over it.

For all they've lost, they are given this much.

* * *

_A/N: "Ni dieu ni maître!" — "Neither God nor master!"  
_

_That's all, folks; thanks for all of your lovely comments. I hope it was as much fun to read as it was to write._


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